I'm there with you, except that jQuery in 2015(/2016) is not just about fashion; it's about technical merit.

The biggest selling point for jQuery was unifying the mess of browser APIs under one, consistent API. Back in 2006 browser support for ecmascript was so haphazard that writing vanilla JS was an absolute ache. Or so I hear.

As years progress, browsers become steadily more conformant. In tandem, jQuery's value drops.

Meanwhile, cost (speed, size) remains constant.

This argument can be made without considering fashion; even if nobody had ever written a single library after John Resig did, jQuery in 2015 could still be considered an strange choice just for that.